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Sandy Island (Vivian Kirkland)
Sandy Island is a female fan-made Hetalia character. She has light blue hair and eyes. Little is known about who she was. History As noted above, French hydrographical charts removed the island starting in 1979. Public claims that the island did not exist began in April 2000 by amateur radio enthusiasts on a DX-pedition.1011 They noted that it was shown on some maps, but not on others such as the 1999 Times Atlas of the World, 10th Edition.11 A discovery of the island's absence was again made on 22 November 2012 by Australian scientists aboard the R/V Southern Surveyor studying plate tectonics in the area. During the voyage, they noticed a discrepancy between different maps and decided to sail to the supposed location to investigate. The crew found no island and recorded depths never less than 1,300 metres (4,300 ft).11213 They found that "the ocean floor actually didn't ever get shallower than 1,300 meters below the wave base…"14 The status of the purported island also became the subject of discussion on scientific mailing lists such as GMT-HELP in late November 2012.15 Some scientists were initially skeptical that such an error could exist since a signature was present in various global terrain data sets, such as the bathymetric data from the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans, which reported an elevation of 1 meter over the location of Sandy Island. Some data sets derived from satellite imagery indicated that sea surface temperatures were absent in the location, suggesting the presence of land. However, it became apparent that a land mask was applied to these data sets during pre-processing to differentiate between land and water. Since the World Vector Shoreline Database (WVS) has become the standard global coastline data set used by the scientific community, errors that existed in WVS propagated into data sets that use a land mask. Therefore, rather than providing independent evidence for the existence of an island, the appearance of Sandy Island in bathymetry and satellite imagery data sets originated from spurious digitized geometries derived from the WVS database.9 The Australian Hydrographic Service, a department of the Royal Australian Navy, said that mapping an island as a copyright trap—a practice in cartography to place a fictitious "trap street" on a map for the purpose of trapping potential copyright violators—would not have been standard practice with nautical charts, and that its appearance on many contemporary maps may have simply been (and partly were) due to human error.1 The island was displayed on the Google Maps internet mapping service until 26 November 2012,1613 when it was removed. On Google Earth's default view the island area is covered by black pixels, but the program's historical imagery feature displays a satellite image of the southern portion taken by DigitalGlobe on 3 March 2009, showing a darkened sea. On 29 November 2012, the National Geographic Society announced that it was officially striking Sandy Island from its maps. "The Geographer" at National Geographic, Juan Valdes, said, "full evidence has finally been presented. 'Sandy Island' has now been officially stricken from all National Geographic map products" Although Sandy Island is no longer alive, her memory still remains. She is known to have died November 26 2012. Her death remains a mystery, commonly known as 'The Sandy Island Mystery'